


all the king's men

by DivineProjectZero



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:25:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3681405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DivineProjectZero/pseuds/DivineProjectZero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t come back the same. Not entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the king's men

**Author's Note:**

> Self-betaed. All mistakes are mine.

There is a crack in you and you can’t fix it.

Sand doesn’t crack, but it’s there all the same. It’s there. Like a sliver of you was cut out and now there is a jagged edge within you, some sort of gap that just won’t mend. Nobody else notices, but you notice, you care, and you can’t quite keep your mind off of it.

The idea that you will walk with this gaping wound forever isn’t as alarming as the idea that this crack will spread, cracking you open, splitting you in half, shredding you into pieces and particles of sand and dust and shattered dreams. It’s possible. You’ve already gone through it once. Your body had melted into black ashes, like a sponge dipped in acidic ink; you’d felt the sand turn against you, swallow you into a suffocating darkness as the nightmares erupted from your skin. You died, disappeared without a trace. Like nobody saw you, knew you, _believed_ in you in the first place.

Then you came back, you died and rose again while Easter was in full swing, and isn’t that ironic? You remember that there was a surge of power—of _you_ —that lifted you out of the nothingness, an empty dark space—darker than under a bed—that you’d been trapped in for a millisecond or an eternity, and you opened your eyes just in time to drive back the nightmares.

You put yourself back together, grain by grain, almost without even thinking about it. And now that you think about it, you feel that you might have missed something. A grain. Maybe two, ten, a hundred? You’ve lost something, you’re sure of it, and maybe you left it in that chasm of nothing, that vacuum of a colorless world. You never want to go back there again, no matter what you left behind, so you have to live with this. This tiny, huge, empty feeling in your chest. Stomach. Throat. It changes like the sand shifting through your body and you never know where it will hurt next.

After Pitch is dragged away by his creations and the children are ushered to bed, you are surrounded by the others. North is jubilant to have you back, Toothiana frets over you, and Bunnymund is gruff and caring all at once. You answer them with your sand, tell them you’re fine; you don’t feel the ache in your fractured self yet.

Jack hangs back, a little away, only coming forth when the other Guardians let up and start prepping the sleigh for return to the North Pole.

“I’m sorry,” he starts but you beat him to it. You take his hand and reassure him with a smile and some sand. The corners of his lips curve up a notch, but his eyes are still serious and they measure you, search you, like searching for a black grain within the gold.

“Things won’t be the same,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean it has to be worse.”

Then he pulls away because the others call for you, call for him, like parents calling for children and you can tell that he loves this, loves you and the others like a family, and you love it too.

And later, when the moon is high above and the wintry workshop is bare, you know what Jack meant. You’re not the same. Death leaves scars on you, invisible marks that can bleed if you scratch them wrong, and these are not marks that fade over time. These are forever, etched into the very grains of your being, and that yawning, bottomless pit of nothing will haunt you in your least guarded moments.

This, you admit, is Pitch’s small victory.

But you earn something else. When you float your way into Jack’s room, when you see him turn from the windows and smile at you, you know why he understands. You know that he is the only one who will. You know that North and Toothiana and Bunnymund are your first friends, your precious ones that you will fight for at all costs, but Jack is the only one who knows the name of that trace death leaves on you even after you escape it. He is the one who shivers—not in cold, not in fear, but in _pain_ —when he remembers the ice closing over, the water in his lungs, the overwhelming nothing until the moonlight calls him back.

When you feel the fracture within you spreading, threatening to swallow you whole, you think of the children you love, the ones you will protect even if you fall into that chasm again. You think of North. Toothiana. Bunnymund. You think of how you will never let them know about your scars under the sand, never let them feel what you feel. You think of Jack, your newest friend, child of death and ice, how you will never let him be caught in the darkness again. How you will never let him lose you, let him suffer in that ache alone.

You don’t come back the same. Not entirely.

You come back with a scar that nobody but a winter spirit knows about. You come back with fear lurking in the recesses of your mind. You come back with a determination to fight, protect, love. You come back fiercer. You come back with dreams of a brighter, safer, warmer world. 

_Once, you dream about shoving a hand into that fractured wound of yours. You yank out a black mare, dark as night, from your gaping chest. You speak to it, because in your dreams you have a voice, and in dreams your words are absolute._

_After you wake, the ache dulls and your dreams glow brighter under the moon._

You are Sandman. You make dreams come true.

_(I am stronger.)_

 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: divineprojectzero  
> twitter: @listento_yousay


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